there are a number of famous criminals back in the game. Being infamous is invaluable on twitter: jordan belfort, Shkreli, billy mcfarland. Just get a twitter account and sell the movie rights
After listening to Shkreli talk for a few hours he seems like the sort of person who thought he was just being clever and it turned out to be technically illegal. As opposed to brazen criminality. I wouldn’t feel bad about hiring him (though would do some more digging first).
A new drug comes before the FDA for approval, and it is opened up for comment. Shkreli lodges an objection to approval of this drug.
Why? Because it's unsafe? No - trials thus far have shown it to be safer than the existing drug options.
Why? Because it's less effective? No - it's also been shown to be more effective than existing drugs.
Perhaps it's more expensive? No - cost of R&D and production, and estimated retail costs are expected to be lower than existing drugs.
Huh, odd. So why in this case would Shkreli oppose this drug getting to the market?
The only reason he lodged an appeal with the FDA had nothing to do with the drug, but was because he and his company had just bought the patent to one of those 'existing drugs' referenced, and this new drug coming to market would crater the demand for his drug, and torpedo the profitability of his investment in buying the patent.
I think he paid his previous investors with money his later venture earned. This is illegal because it's stealing money from the latter venture investors. But heart in the right place, good intentions, imo.
Consider the following scenario: you have just been paid $1000 and you go to an ATM. A dude at the atm mugs you. He sees the big deposit that has just hit your account and says "tell you what, I'll only steal $900. Then you'll still be up $100 overall". You should be fine with this right? You still made $100.
It's the same situation here. He took money that was due to one group of people and paid some of it to another group of people. This idea that if people make a net profit then it's basically ok even though he took some of their money is totally unsuported by the law for good reason.
OpenAI and sama should get no benefit of doubt given his conduct the past year or so, starting with their refusal to say whether or not they trained on youtube data.
In addition to being unaware of case law related to lookalikes/soundalikes (midler, waits), AI bros are showing themselves having ear deafness (like face blindness) claiming to hear no similarities to scarjo.
literally, how does anyone find this acceptable? It makes me feel dumb that I find this outrageous, like the emperor's new clothes: y'all can see this too right?
My strong suspicion is that, for, say, the CEO of Google, this is less about "this will improve the product", or even "LLMs are the future, so we should use them in the present even though they don't work", and more "this is what the markets, which are collectively kinda dumb, have decided they will reward this year, so we will appease them until such time as they move onto a new toy."
See Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain; for a year or so practically every company was announcing some sort of blockchain thing. Did any of these come to anything? Of course not, but that was, when it comes to it, hardly the point.
LLMs are a particularly dramatic example, but I suspect the dynamic is, in reality, more or less the same as metaverses, blockchains, the _previous_ AI bubble (remember the year or so when everyone was announcing chatbots, until Microsoft Tay kinda scared everyone off it abruptly?), and so on.
Many in the tech community have high expectations for Google engineering quality and product development. The expectations are now too high, much like the executives who pushed this feature.
> Many in the tech community have high expectations for Google engineering quality and product development
Wait? Whom has these expectations? I presumed most in the tech industry scoff at anything Google launches, point at Google Graveyard or at all the failures they've been through.
Seriously: aside from search, ads and android, what product has Google developed ever that is of high quality and meeting the high quality? Maybe maps at some point? Gmail, maybe? Google docs? For each and every google product, I can name two competitors that meet much higher expectations of engineering.
Really the only 100% in-house products are Search and Gmail. The rest was bolted on piecemeal into the Borg: maps, android, double click, docs, YouTube, etc. - all acquired.
That’s not a bad thing, Google is really a story about a shrewd - even brilliant - acquisition and integration strategy.
However, they have systemically failed to grow new things in-house - be it space balloon internet, being an ISP, games network, etc etc.
They are likely better off just buying Anthropic at this point.
Maybe it's fake, or maybe it's been fixed since then. Who knows? This is another problem with these closed source services giving "personalized" results that are totally different from one person to the next and one day to the next. How would you propose we authenticate the screenshot?
It may be a doctored image. But we don't know. I don't think these things are deterministic. At least not just with search query. It could be real, and you might get a real response that makes sense.
I recently received a result that gave me the wrong date for a college class registration, which was pretty fucked up. It was off by three days. Luckily, I double checked my schools official website.
it seems most of the big companies try to break the rules while in the process become so strong they trade it off for what becomes a marginal fine & cost of doing business. Facebook, Uber come to mind first. This may just be the same.
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